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Actually, he increased the military budget beyond the rate of inflation. This followed several years of post-Vietnam budget cuts in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan just accelerated what Carter already started.

“Jimmy Carter gave us double-digit inflation and interest rates.”

Actually, these syndromes began during the Nixon and Ford administrations that preceded Carter. Nixon tried wage-and-price controls. Ford tried “WIN” buttons. Carter did the only thing that worked by nominating Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker choked the money supply so severely that the economy fell into a near-depression, but by God, it killed inflation and let the economy reboot under Reagan. Carter’s act of political suicide made Reagan a hero

“Reagan proved lowering taxes raises revenues”:

The fact is that Reagan signed one of the largest tax increases in history and even then by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had created the biggest budget deficit in history.

And Clinton passed a massive tax increase in 93 (without a single Repub vote) that led a few years later to an actual surplus in the federal budget together with the strongest economic growth in our lifetimes.

Notice anything??? 4 out of the top 5 are crazy socialists! And they have they socialized medicine!

Oh, and as for quality of care, we are number 37.

” The Democrat sare anti-business . . . ”

The truth is that, by any objective measure (rapid economic growth, low inflation, job growth, poverty and inequality rates) the Democrats are far more competent managers of the national economy than are Republicans. A nice summary of the evidence is here.

Tax cuts don’t create jobs, people do. If you relentlessly cut taxes, starve the schools and limit the opportunities kids have… no, my poor confused conservative pals, that is not good for the economy.

Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

If nothing else, Katrina surely proved forever that this is false. In the aftermath of the breach of the levees, the people of New orleans would have loved nothing more than to have heard those words. They aren’t what’s scary. What’s scary is letting people who believe that run our government.

Much of the nation wouldn’t have electricity, safe drinking water or the possibility of a college education if it weren’t for the big scary government programs of the 1930s through the 1960s. The G.I. Bill was the greatest investment in America’s future ever made, and brought about not only the greatest era in American History, but created untold wealth and generated long-term prosperity. It was a government-run SOCIALIST program.

(Hey, I’m just doing the old Cut & Paste Troll thing. Repugniscum trolls do it on Lib/Prog sites all the time. Turn-around, as they say, is fair play.)

Published on Friday, June 11, 2004 by the Seattle Times
Reagan’s Destructive Revolution
by Walter Williams

Amid the mountains of praise and the occasional criticism of Ronald Reagan, what may be his most lasting legacy remains hidden. He led a political revolution that radically altered the American system of government and its key institutions.

The revolution began in 1981 under the banner of Reaganism — Ronald Reagan’s anti-government, market-fundamentalist philosophy that now dominates American political thought.

Yet, it is best labeled the “Stealth Revolution” because pundits and the public, after nearly a quarter century, still appear to be unaware of its existence, much less the damage already done. The deleterious changes have stayed under the radar.

Be that as it may, a revolution is in full swing. President Reagan’s two terms put it on course; Reaganism sustained it for the next 12 years; George W. Bush, Reagan’s disciple, re-energized it with a vengeance.

Following the tenets of Reaganism, Bush has led the most undemocratic American government in the post-World War II era. It well may be the least democratic government since 1789.

The result is that the national institutions created by the Constitution to support representative democracy have been disfigured. America has become an entrenched plutocracy where the wealthiest individuals and major corporations unduly influence government decisions to reap benefits at the expense of ordinary citizens.

A modern-day Rip Van Winkle — falling asleep just before Reagan’s inauguration and awakening today — would be amazed to find that the political revolution has eaten away much of the foundation of the American republic during his hibernation. The Stealth Revolution has succeeded to an extent unimaginable a quarter century ago.

In “The Great Unraveling,” Princeton University economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, drawing on Henry Kissinger’s 1957 book, “A World Restored,” pointed out that what the latter labeled a “revolutionary power” intends to crush the existing structure of governance that it views as illegitimate.

Krugman argued: “One should regard America’s right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.”

At the same time, it needs underscoring that the full implications of the political change can be perceived only when cast in a broader historical context going back to the start of the Reagan administration. The first shots were fired in 1981, not 2001; the Reagan revolution began over two decades ago.

Reagan’s unshakable conviction that the federal government was the nation’s biggest domestic problem, and his efforts to constrain it, severely reduced that government’s capacity to serve the American people and undermined representative democracy.

His commitment to an unfettered free market, deep reductions in the top income-tax rates, and massive deregulation for businesses greatly increased the political power of the wealthiest citizens and corporate America. A straight road to plutocracy lay open.

With Reaganism dominating public thinking during the 20 years before the Bush presidency, the Republicans had in place a solid base to launch the blitzkrieg that firmly entrenched the plutocratic regime. What have they done?

To start with, there is iron political control from the top ensuring far greater White House domination over the federal agencies than at any time in the past. Secrecy and deception permeate the Bush presidency, keeping needed decision-making information from the public and Congress and distorting what is disseminated.

The Republican majority exercises the same autocratic control in the House of Representatives by severely restricting debate and excluding Democrats from conference committees.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has transformed the conference committees, which in the past were restricted to reconciling disagreements between House and Senate bills, into a key means of inserting major changes, not appearing in either bill, during the conference.

Sheer power has been substituted for the deliberations leading to reasoned compromises that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, believed to be central to a flourishing democracy.

Congress no longer placed its constituents’ interests over those of special interests — in this case, the wealthiest, most powerful citizens and corporations. America has ceased to be the world’s greatest representative democracy.

Ronald Reagan is dead, but Reaganism, and the Stealth Revolution it engendered, lives on with all its destructive force. And I fear it may be Reagan’s most lasting legacy unless the nation wakes up and sees what the Reagan revolution has wrought. Cassandras are not always wrong.

Walter Williams, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs, is the author of the recently published “Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy.”

although you make a compelling argument, I beg to differ on several of your deliberately provocative points. I have heard many good points by Walter Williams but this honestly makes me question his credibility. I believe in the values Reagan lead by, and i think to degrade them is shamefull. some of the speculation here can easily be debated and with a much less biased result. I honestly don”t think this sounds like the walter Williams I am familiar with>

It’s a good thing we have history on our side now with Reagan creating the largest deficit. Krugman should give back his Nobel, for the only reason Krugman and his boss in the White House received a Nobel was for the virtue of their being liberals.

I’m travelin’ down the road and I’m flirtin’ with disaster
I’ve got the pedal to the floor and my life is running faster
I’m outta money outta hope it looks like self destruction
Well how much more can we take with all of this corruption

That pretty much sums up the math. You see Sir, the math in uncorruptible. Even with a $6 Trillion deficit. Say again Sir, which president created the largest deficit and which Nobel winner advised him to do so?

While Reagan was mostly a liberal (for larger government), you’re incorrect about your standard of living chart. The Scandinavian countries are not socialist.

First, standard of living scales are based off arbitrary factors, generally measured in how much the government takes care of people, not in economic freedom.

Second, they promote private property and do not try and steer markets. They don’t bailout and prop up every failing business. They let the market correct itself. Something the precious Krugman would never allow.

The only thing that makes them socialist by definition is their variety of social programs. We have lots of social programs, but liberals bitch when people say we’re socialists.

The difference is we don’t have *equal* social programs, due to the efforts to protect certain groups over others, which has caused their poverty more than anything.

I shouldn’t have to mention the government insuring loans to encourage banks to make riskier loans to make sure everyone has a house. These people pour their savings into a bad investment, then lose it when the market corrects itself–along with their savings. Forget that when this happens, it will generally coincide with a downswing of the economy, and a number of people will suffer twice. Artificial interest rates + government intervention in markets = doom for everyone.

I’m not defending conservatives either. To me, they’re all the same. They’re all hawks, want to expand government, and could care less that we’re all being groped by the TSA.

I would agree with you Randy. Reagan was no liberal by any stretch of the imagination. His lasting legacy will prove to be one of “peace through strength” and his ability to communicate with the American people was singularly his greatest asset! He was one of the greatest Presidents for sure!

Rod, you have obviously not been to public school lately. The money spent per child has gone up annually for decades and now we even have to donate points to high school kids on their standardized tests. Putting money into public schools the way they are run now does no good at all for the economy. More “high school graduates” who can’t make change at the register will not help “innovation” and money alone is not the answer. I am not a fan of the public school system in this nation. It needs a complete overhaul. For starters, English is our language. For seconds, “special needs students” need special needs schools. I definitely want them to have an education – I work with special needs children and adults and they are often very bright, but their special requirements (and they are unique to each child) should not be inflicted on a regular classroom teacher who has his or her hands full with the “regular” kids. For thirds, kids who can’t sit still, listen, and do their assignments, should be removed from the classroom until they can. We used to call this “ready to learn” and you couldn’t get into kindergarten until you would do that AND follow the teacher’s instructions. I’d like to see that practice reinstated.

I hope you look back at this Rob. How are those socialist nations fairing today? Greece ring a bell. Typical liberal bile being spewed on anyone who will gladly lend an ear. No thanks, Knob. Why don’t you move to those supremely socialist nations you so highly rant on about?

Boy, you just blah-blah like a chatty Kathy, don’t you? You’re also bending many facts and shaping things to bend to your Liberalism. This was several years ago, and your King Obama has ruined this country since then. Also, you don’t have any understanding of economics and you fail to tell the whole story about “Socialized medecine”.

Full of inaccuracies. Reagan compromised with Dems and agreed to a temporary non-income tax rate increase because the economy was not yet growing enough to offset the loss of revenue from lower tax rates. Once the economy did grow, as it never had before, the end result was a doubling of federal revenues. His emphasis was always on taxing income. Next, there is no credible, logical evidence to associate the economic growth of the late 1990s with Clinton’s tax increase of the early 90s. In fact, all through Clinton’s first term the economy grew at a very weak rate of about 2% a year. A stronger case can be made that the compromises he made with Republicans that once again lowered taxes in 1995 helped trigger the growth Clinton as always erroneously taken credit for. Of course most of the credit goes to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other technological entrepreneurs who changed the entire American economy to an information based one in the late 1990s.

You Leftists need to get over your dogma. I am sorry, but Karl Marx was wrong. So was Woodrow Wilson – state managed economies do not work

you could not be more wrong. YOu make an argument so rediculous, you compare apples to oranges, you say things equivelent to “If two plus to is four then that proves 5″ Show me one eruopean country that is in the black right now. Show me one liberal state here in our country that is not in need of bail out from the feds, who now need a bail out.

Show me one movie that was ever made about a family trying to escape from capitolism and fearing they will be shot. Show me one capitolist society that builds walls or iron curtains to keep their citizens in. Show me how 100 million chinese starving to death is moral. Show me how 30 million russians starving to death is moral.

Show me how we sustain the unsustainable. If you took all, and I mean all of the evil 1 percenters’ money you could not run the government for a week, then what?

Show me one government program that opperates effeciently. Post office, Lisence Bereau? Wellfare line? Job service? Military? You are a fool.

Your argument is so full of holes it lacks enough for me to even attack it. Why is it so important to you people that you attack the providers? How do you really think this will turn out? Have you ever opened a history book? EVER? Your plans end every damn time in murder, mass murder , starvation, and nation wide poverty.

My way, made the greatest country in the history of the world.

As for your list of more successfull countries, Bull shit. Do you make this stuff up? to what end? to remove freedom and liberty and hand it over to the government, even thought europe is falling apart in front of our eyes implementing your plan, they have not read a history book either
You are a fool. I could destroy you in a debate. I dare you. But you would probably look for someone else to do it for you

You seem to be the living embodiment of this quote. What you know just isn’t so. When Reagan entered office, top marginal tax rate was 70%. When he left is was 28%. I’m no math whiz, but I believe 28 is lower than 70.

Furthermore, revenues to the treasury doubled during Reagan’s term. The deficit proves that even doubling revenues isn’t enough to keep pace with a Democrat Congress.

The bottom line is this… every dollar government spends must first be taken by force from Americans who earned it. Every expansion of government equals a corresponding loss of your freedom and liberty.

Producing a long list of opinions doesn‘t give the authority necessary for factual judgment. As one example, Bill Clinton’s alleged claim to have created a surplus is contradicted by figures from the U.S. Treasury dept. Looking at the makeup of the national debt and the claimed surpluses for the last 4 Clinton fiscal years, we see the following:

While the public debt went down in each of those four years, the intragovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount–and, in turn, the total national debt (which is public debt + intragovernmental holdings) went up.
When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false–as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton did do was pay down the public debt–but notice that the claimed surplus is related closely to the decrease in the public debt for those years. So he paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly from Social Security). This old trick was used before Clinton, but not to such an extent. It’s just another case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” It was like you or I balancing our budgets with a Visa card.

BTW, according to Homer, Cassandra was RIGHT, but was cursed so that no one believed her.

Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Reagan’s legacy
From an article by Mark Ames in The Exile:
“When Ronald Reagan took power in 1981, Americans lived completely different lives. Health care insurance was a given for nearly all working Americans. Downsizing – the concept of mass layoffs in order to boost a CEO’s bonus – hadn’t entered the vocabulary. Neither had outsourcing. Working parents came home from work before sundown and ate dinners with their families. Unions were strong, and the industrialists felt a social responsibility to ensuring their workers’ well-being. This was all reflected in the income differential: in 1979, the average CEO earned 30 times his average employees’ wage. For some reason no one wants to remember this part of the past – because it’s too depressing, and speaks too obviously to the real decline in America.

Reagan came to office and told the plutocrats to take everything that they wanted. I mean everything. Today, CEOs make 571 times their average employees’ wage. Today’s male white collar workers in America only earn, in real dollars, six cents per hour more today than they earned in 1973. Health care is increasingly hard to come by, no job is ever safe, Americans work far longer hours and suffer from stress-related illnesses once unheard of. As an Economic Policy Institute report noted, ‘What income growth there was over the 1979-1989 period was driven primarily by more work at lower wages.’ What happened to Russia in the 90s was really started by Reagan’s attack on Americans in the 80s. When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he told America he was literally willing to kill us all if we didn’t give in to his plan to transfer the wealth out of the pockets of the middle- and lower-middle classes and into the plutocrats’ offshore accounts. It was so shocking that it worked. The air controller’s union broke – and so did a whole way of life. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we are all miserable wage slaves . . . or exiles.”

This wasn’t an accident. It was – dare I say it – a conspiracy. Reagan was put in power with the express purpose of destroying the middle class and ending any hope that the sons and daughters of the poor might rise to the middle class through education and hard work. The destruction of the middle class is his real and lasting legacy. Reagan’s murder of the middle class and its institutions, a process which has led directly to Bush’s neoconservatives, has just now been noticed by progressive commentators (favorite, from Canadian painter Robert Bateman – here: http://www.batemanideas.com/GlobeMail.html), some of whom have suggestions for how to resuscitate it. In reflecting on the nearly disastrous Canadian election, I noted how easy it is for conservatives to destroy the results of the hard work and sacrifices (up to and including their lives) of generations of progressives (if you look at the list, you can see that all good is done by progressives, and conservatives spend all their time trying to destroy the good). The effort of decades or even centuries can be destroyed, probably permanently, by the work of a tiny group of conservatives in power for only a few years. The key point of the conspiracy, and the permanent legacy of Reagan, was drastically to reduce the cost of labor. The middle class was an obstacle to this, as by definition the middle class consisted of workers who had enough economic security to have some control over the sale of their labor, and the ability to educate their offspring to rise above their own economic status. The point of post-Reagan conservatism is to create such fear and uncertainty in people that they can have no ability to prevent the ongoing erosion of their earning ability. The main goal of today’s conservatives is cheap labor, and it is accurate to describe them as ‘cheap-labor conservatives’. Not forgetting all the other awful things that Reagan did, what he should always be remembered for is his start of the process, a process which continues with a vengeance by Bush, of destroying middle class America in order to create a permanent underclass whose sole purpose is the enrichment of the plutocrats. Unfortunately, it will be decades, if not longer, before this terrible wrong is righted. The destructive capability of today’s cheap-labor conservatives is so great that even voting for them once, in order to chastise another political group, is madness.

Rod, your attempt to use facts to support your beliefs is admirable (I wish more liberals would make the effort), but it falls apart on the second line of your first comment.

Your statement that Conservatives believe “Jimmy Carter cut the military budget” is false. Further, it’s a typical liberal tactic to attribute a false belief to Conservatives so you can attack them. In fact, a Google search of that phrase reveals only one website in which a Conservative makes that statement.

The more accurate statement of belief (which also happens to be true) is that Conservatives generally believe Carter had a terrible record on defense spending compared to other presidents. This is true and supported by the facts. According to budget figures (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/pdf/hist.pdf#page=140), defense spending during the Carter years was lower as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than at any other time between 1962 and the end of the Reagan years.

That you begin with a misleading statement diminishes the credibility of your liberal comments. Sorry, you’re wrong.

Well, whatever Reagan did or did not do, we know the US economy after during and after the 80’s was the best it had been in a long time. We also know that the Soviets were ended, and that had been a goal for decades. We also know that he inspired the majority of us to hold to our American ideals, even if the rest of them, the Left, never understood them.

You on the Left will never get it until you can step outside the university classroom for a while, and start listening to the rest of us, instead of just to each other. Rod, this means you too, if you’re still around.

Just ran across this and I find it Hilarious that conservatives are losing their mind over this but only one of you made an attempt to dispute any of it and the one is so sophomoric that my 8 year old could rebut it. Since he’s busy I’ll do it:

[sarcasm]ZOMG you mean military spending was higher during the vietnam war?? NOOOOO that can’t possibly be true. How could any country have MORE military spending during a war than during peace time? Are you insane. But you don’t stop there with your insanity, go on to say Reagan had higher defense spending than Carter? NOOOOOOOOO…. STOP IT I CAN’T TAKE IT!! This can’t possibly be true… I mean, it’s not like Reagan’s strategy was to outspend the Soviets and bankrupt them.[/sarcasm]

Hey all you salt of the earth republican farmer johns, book learning ain’t so bad, try it.

Right on Chuck. The libs have SELF-PROCLAIMED “elitism”, “superior knowledge”, and all of the rest of their claims that must comfort their low self-images’esteems and do it with arrogance through their out of bound egos. Sickness. They’ll never know this for their absolute lack of “common sense”, and will not try to because they are living in denial. They are destroying our country and cannot and will not ever take rightful credit for it.

“Wellllllll; there you go again, Rod” grabbing your facts straight out of your ass. If your even old enough to remember, it was Peanut Carter who started the printing presses to flood the economy with cash in order to appear he was doing a great job on the economy. It was Milton Friedman (may he RIP) who instructed Ronald Reagan to make sure he shut the presses down and under no circumstances take the bait to fire them up. He was told he might be a one term President, but he would save the American economy. So, Rod, keep your facts coming, but like Reagan once said; “It’s not that the liberal is ignorant; it’s just that he knows so many facts that aren’t so.” So, Rod, were you making an attempt here to sound intelligent with your wrong facts?? Doesn’t appear to have worked………

I just have a hard time believing how ignorant most of the left is, and as for the jack@$$ professor that made the comment about the dumb farmers picking up a book, just makes my first comment all the more true. If you ever met a farmer I’m 100% positive he could teach you something and then whip your butt to boot. Thats something you don’t learn in any book.

@Sarcasm
You’re missing the point, you need a balance of book knowledge *and* common sense.
If you read a book called “what to do if a car comes toward you” but you don’t have the common sense to apply what you learned, then you *will* get run-over.
If you are combining two chemicles (one being clear, another being milky white)and common sense tells you that one is water, but the other is milk, then you (ignorant of the fact that the two chemicles ignite each other) will get burned.
You *need* a balance of the two, and that was the point that the guy you were critisizing was trying to make.

Liberals keep praising Clinton’s high taxes and booming economy of 90’s without taking into consideration or on purpose that during 90s there was a boom in web and cell-phones development and Clinton simply took advantage of it and raised taxes. So with high employment and high taxes he got a surplus.

[…] Madeira var addthis_product = 'wpp-257'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true};Ronald Reagan once said, “…the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know […]

[…] for machete control here and in his adopted homeland.Ronald Reagan had this one about right. He once said, “Well,the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,but that they know so […]

Clinton’s tax increase in 1993 led to government surpluses? Really? Only the most liberal of liberals can believe such garbage, conveniently ignoring the DOT.COM rage as the reason for such prosperity. However, ’tis typical liberal reasoning – though wrong.

Yes, that trillions of dollars in debt (more than any president in history), illegal gun running to Mexico that cost the lives of several Americans, Benghazi cover-up, wasteful programs (tunnels for turtles), rising gas prices, higher taxes that will now skyrocket, suing states for trying to protect their borders, massive influx of illegal immigrants, ignoring the Constitution to push a Socialist agenda, overstepping his bounds by ignoring the Constitutional process of going through congress, forcing Catholic and other regilious private hospitals to approve and perform abortions and contrreceptions (Constitutionally illegal), invasion of the Second Amendment, bowing to Saudi princes, high unemployment (in raw numbers far higher than what is currently reported), refusing to allow drilling on our own lands and waters to get us off of foreign oil, forcing private enterprise businesses to produce products that won’t sell (lightbulbs and Voltas), and many other things surely prove your point. So, either you’re a 20-something that never lived through the Reagan era, or you’re the stupidiest Liberal jackass alive!

An impressive share! I’ve just forwarded this onto a co-worker
who was conducting a little homework on this. And he actually
ordered me lunch simply because I found it for him…
lol. So allow me to reword this…. Thank YOU for the meal!!
But yeah, thanx for spending the time to discuss this subject here
on your website.